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Editor's Pick: Astor Piazzolla

Long before I knew I was interested in dance, all I listened to was 90s industrial metal and goth rock. Nothing wrong with that, besides being angry all the time, and there is a place for that vibe for sure but... One day I walked into the (now closed) Tower Records Classical Annex looking for something dramatic on the listening stations. What I found was unexpected, a tango CD by someone called Astor Piazzolla. While I didn't have the $$ for the CD at the time, I returned to the store for a solid week just to listen to that tango music.

Astor's genius has now been a solid staple of my music collection for nearly 10 years.

Piazzolla (bandoneón) and the musicians he assembled for this quintet
(Fernando Suárez Paz, violin; Pablo Ziegler, piano; Horacio Malvicino,
Sr., guitar; and Héctor Console, bass) gave the performances of their
collective lifetimes when they made this album, recorded in NYC in May
of 1986. It is the zenith of Piazzolla's career - and that's saying a
lot, considering the contributions he made to music in his lifetime.

The
music is nuevo tango - the traditional soul of tango, full of the
emotion that it has always carried (and with which it carries its
listeners and dancers), charged and reborn with all of the grit and
grime that exists `at street level'. Gosh - if the tangos we're used to
hearing and seeing in the old films made your grandmother blush, this
would most certainly put her on the floor in a dead faint. The music is
intricately composed - but at the same time, it is FELT in the depths
of the soul. There is nothing whatsoever cold and emotionless about it.
The musicians themselves are of the highest caliber - some are
classically trained, some have their roots in jazz, but they are all
under the spell of Piazzolla's vision. The quiet passages purr and
stroke the senses, the more strident ones will pick the listener up and
toss them around. The music will make you want to close your eyes and
drift away one moment, then have you sweating the next.

The music of Astor Piazzolla epitomized our situation in the modern
world with his fusion of folkloric beauty and contemporary tension. He
forged a new music that challenged the
traditionalist and left the
adventurous craving more. He took the music of the great tango masters
like Garde, ripped it away from the velvet-walled concert hall and the
soft-cushion drawing room, and slapped it down on the pavement of
Buenos Aires. Reviled by the critics, shunned even by the conservative
government, his music spoke to the next generation, and popular and
jazz musicians and listeners all over the world eventually fell under
the spell of his "nuevo tango." In recent years, Piazzolla has taken
the new tango back to the concert halls, composing and performing works
for chamber ensembles like Kronos Quartet, larger groups like The
Orchestra of St. Luke's, even an opera company. These works brought his
once radical music back into the mainstream.